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About regions

When you're creating new Rackspace cloud resources it's important to understand what a region is and how to use regions effectively.

What is a Region?

A region is a collection of one or more data centers interconnected by a low-latency, high-bandwidth network. A region can be viewed as a "logical data center" and is designated by the three-letter code for a nearby airport (like DFW for Dallas/Forth Worth and LON for London).

Note: Because Classic v1 and Next Generation Cloud Servers have different architectures, they are not considered to be in the same region, even if they are in the same data center. For example, a Classic v1 and Next Generation server that are both located in the DFW data center are not in the same region.

Region availability

Not all cloud services are available in all regions.

Because of maintenance or capacity concerns, the provisioning of cloud services might also be restricted in some regions in which they are normally available. Contact Support to request access to a restricted region.

Note: At this time, the provisioning of cloud services in the ORD region is not available to new customers. If you are a new customer, you can open a ticket in the Cloud Control Panel to add ORD to your account, pending approval.

Benefits of using regions

Whenever possible, consider locating all of your Rackspace infrastructure in the same region to receive the following benefits:

Geographic choice: You can provision resources closer to your end users or other applications, data centers, clouds, and so on. This becomes increasingly important with hybrid on-premises to public cloud scenarios.

Network performance: All resources provisioned within a region have internal connectivity over a private, low latentcy, high bandwidth network. The physical distance between resources is small and improves the speed of network traffic and throughput.

Free bandwidth. All communication over the Rackspace Network (aka ServiceNet) within the same region is free.

About free bandwidth

The example explains how to avoid bandwidth charges for communication between resoruces in the same region.

Let's say you're going to set up a new Cloud Load Balancer that will service two Cloud Servers currently running in the Dallas region. When you create the new load balancer, choose the same region as your servers, in this Dallas (DFW) region. There will be no bandwidth charges for the communications between the servers and load balancers in this region. Note that if later added a Cloud Server running in the Chicago region to the load balancer in Dallas, normal bandwith charges would be incurred for traffic between the server in Chicago and the load balancer in Dallas.

The diagram below provides a visual representation of this concept:

This concept applies to all Rackspace cloud infrastructure that allows you to select a region when you create the resource. In most cases, you should create your resources in the same region to keep the resource close to end-users and other infrastructure, for increased network performance, and to avoid internal bandwidth charges.